Albert Huffstickler
The Place
He thought there was a place that he could go to
where everything would sort itself out,
that he just had to keep going till he found that place
and his life would begin again
without any of the old quirks and hesitations
that had haunted and baffled him since birth.
It never occurred to him that this was a myth or an illusion.
It was merely a matter of finding the right place.
Only years later after much heartbreak did it occur to him
that this wasn’t quite the way it was.
By then, age and loneliness had taken their toll
and he sat in a cheerless room in a nameless town
staring at a wall where time and a leaking roof
had scrawled an indecipherable hieroglyph
that seemed to him the very essence of his dilemma.
And it came to him that his journey was over,
that it was simply a matter of sitting and contemplating
this baffling symbol till all the truth of his life was revealed.
It was for this reason that he fought when they came for him,
fought with all the fury of a lifetime,
as they lifted and bore him to another final place,
a place of no alternatives
from which there was no escape.
Page(s) 12
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